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GAYS AND FRUSTRATION
#1
1 Frustration-inadequacy and frustration-rejection 
 
This chapter is dedicated to the experience of frustration, I immediately clarify that I intend to speak specifically about frustration, not anxiety or even more generally of discomfort, things that, however, they can be linked to the frustration.
 
The etymology itself of the term frustration, derived from the Latin adverb frustra = in vain, to no avail, clearly indicates that frustration is a form of discomfort resulting from the impossibility or the failure to achieve an expected or desired result. Frustration is one of the possible outcomes of the desired.
 
The reduction of the sense of frustration can derive only from the containment of the need or the desire within the sphere of the possible and even better of the probable, in other words only an ability to assess ex ante the greater or less feasibility of one's desire allows to limit the its possible frustrating outcomes.
 
It’s here where the radical distinction of objectives comes into play in relation to whether or not their realization depends only on us. I clarify the discourse with two classic examples:
1) Completing of studies (individual objective).
2) Finding reciprocity in an emotional relationship (shared goal).
 
These are two radically different objectives. The completion of the studies depends only on the more or less conditioned action of the individual who can find objective obstacles but who is aware that the achievement of the objective (individual objective), beyond the external conditioning, depends in an essential way from his commitment and his capacities, in this case frustration is essentially perceived as a sense of inadequacy.
 
Finding reciprocity in an affective relationship is instead a fact substantially connected to an interpersonal relationship, this means that the achievement of the objective doesn’t depend only on the person who is focusing on that goal but also, and in an essential way, on another person who should share that goal (shared goal). In this case frustration is perceived as rejection.
 
It is not uncommon, however, that a frustration-rejection is also experienced as a frustration-inadequacy on the basis of identifying the causes of rejection in one's own inadequacy: "He refused me because I am not up to the situation or because I have failed in something", at the basis of these arguments however, there is a non-genuinely relational view of affective relationships that are interpreted as a kind of chess game in which, if the moves are not mistaken, you still get to win the game. In this way the other is seen as an object to be conquered with a strategy that, if adequate, necessarily leads to the result. This way of seeing things, even if in many cases it is completely incongruous, seems absolutely obvious to those who adopt it as their own interpretative model, to the point of obscuring the objectivity of the facts.
Let me explain with a concrete example.
 
2 Unrealizable goals
 
A gay guy who falls madly in love with an objectively heterosexual guy is induced to see his object of love as a repressed gay and not as a heterosexual and to think that with an appropriate strategy it will be possible to make sure that he takes note of his presumed repressed homosexuality. In such situations, the feeling of frustration-inadequacy can last for years and sometimes it becomes difficult to realize how things really are, even when the other gets married.
 
It is essential to realize that some things, however deeply desired, are objectively impossible. A heterosexual guy cannot fall in love with a gay guy, whatever strategy the gay guy uses, the thing will be anyway  impossible, so we should put aside the idea of being inadequate (not handsome enough, not solar enough, not reliable enough, too much neurotic etc. etc.) and realize that rejection is not a refusal of the person as such but a manifestation of the objective impossibility of sharing the objectives of the other. I pause for a moment to reflect on the feeling of being rejected.
 
The feeling of rejection that occurs when the other doesn’t share our goal is often experienced, especially by gay guys in love with straight guys, as a refusal not generically of the person but of the person as a gay, rather than as an inability to share the goal of the other, and this sometimes makes the process of accepting homosexuality more difficult.
 
Expecting a straight guy to fall in love with a gay guy makes no sense but expecting him to be a gay guy's friend is realistic. A gay guy in these situations is often brought to the "all or nothing", the thing is also understandable and a downsizing of the goal that makes it a shared goal is often difficult because even if the gay guy were to settle for a friendly relationship with the heterosexual guy he is in love with, he would still be frustrated in his "true, even if unrealistic, objective" that is to build a shared love story.
 
However, metabolizing the feeling of refusal of an emotional and sexual involvement by a straight guy, for a gay guy is still, all in all, a process of awareness of reality not too traumatic, because difficulties are basically objective and objectively insurmountable.
 
3 Frustrations in relationships between gays
 
The topic becomes much more delicate when the feeling of rejection intervenes in the relationship with another gay, here it is about a refusal on subjective ground that for the rejected person is much more difficult to accept and it is much more frequently accompanied by a feeling of inadequacy. In these situations, projective mechanisms typically come into play, for which one’s own feelings and expectations are projected onto the other and it is very difficult to understand that the other is objectively another, with a different individual story, with other desires and with a completely autonomous lived experience.
 
Generally, when a gay guy falls in love, the first and insistent question that arises concerns the sexual orientation of the other, if the other is not gay there is nothing to do, but if the other is gay it seems that the problem is solved and that the reciprocity will be achieved in any case, it is the typical "gay + gay = love" theorem behind which very strong projective mechanisms are hidden that make us see in the other, identified as a gay, an individual identical to ourselves.
 
We must never forget that gays don’t constitute a homogeneous category, there are gays of any political orientation, of any social level, of any religious creed or without any religious belief, there are gays who are excellent people and there are gays who aren’t at all, exactly as it is in the general population.
 
Gays are not a kind of Eden where everything is governed by good feelings, nor a kind of hell in which everything is dominated by individual interest and lower instincts. Gays are profoundly different from one another because they have behind them deeply different individual stories. So it is not at all obvious that a gay man can feel comfortable with another gay just because they are both gay and, I stress it, If two gays can quite easily become friends because they have something in common, it is certainly unlikely that two gay guys can feel a mutual sexual and affective feeling just because they are both gay, exactly as a hetero doesn’t fall in love with an ordinary woman just because she is a woman.
 
4 Frustration coming from projective mechanisms and socialization
 
Mechanisms that make us to project onto the other, as a gay, our feelings and our ways of reasoning can move us away from an objective assessment of the facts and can create completely unrealistic expectations. What can protect us from these projective mechanisms that often lead us to frustration? The answer is almost obvious, it is the socialization. The more a boy has a rich social and affective life, I speak above all of friendships, the more he has direct experience of the variability of the individuals with whom he interacts and the less he is led to the projective mechanisms.
 
I give a concrete example. A gay guy, who was writing to me his first embarrassed mail, told me: "I've never met another gay boy" for him the "gay boy" category was still unified and not having precise references he completed it seeing the "gay boy"  as another himself. That same guy, after a few nights spent chatting with other gay boys, said: "I realized that with many guys I can get along but with someone it's like there's a bigger distance, even if they are anyway very good guys, they have another way of reasoning, but there are some guys I feel really good with." These speeches are the typical sign of a progressive socialization and therefore of the progressive decrease of the projective tendency.
 
5 Virtual relationships between gays
 
We now try to focus our attention on virtual couple relationships (chats, e-mails and forums) that can arise between gay guys. If we want to give the word love a connotation that is not excessively abstract, it must be assumed that love cannot be reduced to an intellectual affinity or a sharing of moral values but must necessarily presuppose a physical-physiological involvement, not necessarily experienced in couple, that deeply involves sexuality. At this point an observation is obligatory. When, in real life, a gay guy falls in love with another guy, falling in love doesn’t start from the intellectual level or from possible elective affinities but from physical attraction, that is from a whole set of factors that depend on the physicality of the other: his smile, his physical presence, his voice, his bodily attitudes, his tendency to a more or less seductive behavior.
 
This is so true that very often gay guys fall in love with straight guys far from them in every respect, but able to physically embody their ideal guy. If a guy appears to us physically attractive, we start asking ourselves questions about him and want to find a closeness also in terms of dialogue, in practice we are interested in that guy.
 
This mechanism of falling in love, which is typical of real life, cannot be put into practice through the internet where everything remains detached from the physical dimension. In these situations intervenes a projective mechanism that makes us imagine the guy with whom we are talking in chat according to our categories.
 
6 Texts not sexually connoted
 
Let me clarify with a very immediate example what a projective mechanism is and how much it can be conditioning. In appendix to this chapter can be read a story "not sexually connoted", that is a story that does not present in the text any element that allows to clarify with certainty if one of the protagonists is a boy or a girl [In many languages but not in English, adjectives and past participles are accorded to the term to which they refer. In English third person's pronouns are different for masculine a feminine, in any case, using the direct speech in second person and sometimes the impersonal speech “one can keep one’s own secrets” avoiding to refer to the sex of someone, it is possible this way to save ambiguity even in English] (in Italian it is possible to achieve the same result  avoiding pronouns of the third person, past participles or adjectives and using frequently the impersonal speech). A story not sexually connoted, therefore, is in itself neutral.
 
When that story is read by a straight guy, that guy interprets it according to his categories. But when that story is read by a gay guy reading is not so automatic and the gay guy often notices that the text is not sexually connoted, what usually escapes a heterosexual guy. On this basis projective tests for the determination of sexual orientation that have a real reliability can be built.
 
The projective reading is basically the reason for the fascination of literature or cinema because we project ourselves into the events and interpret them according to our experience.
 
7 Online chats and projective mechanisms
 
An exchange of e-mails, a chat conversation or a dialogue on a forum create a text, or better they construct a four-handed text. That text has the characteristics of literature, even more accentuated by the fact that it is built in four hands, it is the most suitable context for the projective readings but while in the projective reading of a book one doesn’t aim to build an interpersonal relationship and everything remains inside the reader's mind, in the relationships via  internet the projective tendency must sooner or later take into account that on the other side there is another guy with his projections on the same conversation.
 
There is basically the risk of misunderstanding, aggravated by the fact that many chat conversations remain at extremely sublimated and symbolic levels and are therefore extremely open to projective interpretations. The role of important projective mechanisms in Internet contacts can be so decisive as to induce the two interlocutors even put aside the idea of a personal knowledge that could interrupt or destroy the projective mechanism which in itself is at least apparently gratifying.
 
8 The drift of the love language
 
I add that often in the dialogues in chat  between gay guys it is common to find the mechanism of the drift of the love language that is the progressive and automatic indulging in a language that more and more resembles a love language, this means that it is not at all rare that two guys who have never met in person, end up talking like lovers.
 
The emotional investment in these mechanisms is often very high and the projective dimension is such that the risk that the conversation is reduced to being just the starting point for the construction of stories that exist only at the projective level is very concrete. Basically we create an interlocutor to our measure, projectively completing the real elements (often scarce and of uncertain meaning) that emerge from the dialogue. This is so true that a gay guy comes to fall in love with a straight guy, interpreting every little element that does not appear 100% hetero as the sign of a possible homosexuality, and at the same time devaluing all those elements that also very clearly show that that guy isn’t at all a gay guy.
 
But I must stress that the mechanism also operates in relationships between gay guys, that is, between guys who know with certainty that the other is gay. The projective mechanism reaches the point of attributing to the other a presumed physicality, that is, it comes to embody him in an image that represents our ideal guy.
 
Sometimes and not rarely the projective image of the other is also loaded with sexual values and we try a sexual transport that is not at all superficial for a guy we've never seen. In practice we fall in love even sexually with a guy that at 90% has been created by our projective imagination that also attributes a physicality to him according to what we want.
 
The drift of the love language then does the rest and gives the clear impression that one is building a true love story. But in all this there is a fundamental mistake, in practice the natural mechanism that leads from physical attraction to emotional love is completely distorted. It must be remembered that to fall in love in the true sense of the word, a physical-physiological involvement is essential but must be addressed to a real person, not to an image created by our projective fantasy.
 
Some surrogates of the physical presence, such as photos or videos cannot in any way replace the physical presence that is and remains the necessary element of a true falling in love, I mean that without the physical presence and without an authentic form of involvement physical-physiological, love doesn’t exist at all.
 
I would like to warn youngsters who know each other in a chat against letting themselves go to the drift of love language, which only creates expectations that can then be completely destroyed even by a very brief meeting in which we realize that our projections don’t have anything in common with reality and that the discourse (but only the discourse) has been going on freely, far beyond reality.
 
It is generally very easy to let yourself go in a chat to big speeches, to say "I like you" and also "I love you" without a concrete foundation but it is very difficult to resize these statements later, when these speeches have created and consolidated expectations that a direct personal knowledge can destroy in a sudden and traumatic way.
 
At this point, if when the two guys meet in person the disillusionment is mutual, all in all, the problem is easily solved because the expectations of both parties vanish at the same time but if one of them is disillusioned and the other on the contrary feels strongly attracted also physically, the dissymetries become very strong and the situations become difficult to manage.
 
9 Friendships in chat
 
In chat or via e-mail, that is without direct personal knowledge, it is rather possible and, I would say, much less risky, to create friendships, which are much less conditioned by projective mechanisms than possible love stories. I notice that the spontaneous tendency of the guys is to look for a boyfriend, a lover, rather than one or more real friends in chat, but the internet tools are much better suited to the creation and maintenance of friendships than to the creation of love stories.
 
As a good rule of prudence I would say that it would be good to reserve speeches with strong emotional connotation only to people we actually met even outside the chat or the forum, that is people we met in person. And here an important reflection intervenes. Meeting in two in real life after having met in chat, gives that meeting a very strong emotional connotation and makes it appear as a step towards the construction of an important and mutual story. This is why it is generally better to build relationships that start from friendship, from seeing each other in a group, that is, from relationships that don’t create too many expectations that could turn into disillusionment.
 
Friendship is always the first step, if the physical presence is engaging and encouraging then it may make sense to go a step further, otherwise friendship remains and is not compromised by the fact that no story with greater involvement derives from it because undeclared expectations have not been fed.
 
I would like to stress that the network (used with the utmost caution, for heaven's sake!) offers possibilities but can also lead to very heavy disillusionments. If you love someone, even just as a friend, you must avoid deluding him and take him to cold showers that leave a deep sense of bitterness. So it is good to always maintain an attitude of responsibility and think first about the possible consequences of what you are going to do or to say. Closed this parenthesis on online meetings, we return to the topic of frustration.
 
10 The value of experience
 
The other key element, beyond socialization, to prevent the sense of frustration is experience. The first refusal can be really traumatic, the following are certainly less, in essence our psyche considers the first traumas of rejection as a kind of vaccination that attenuates the virulence of the following ones. The rejection trauma often leads to behaviors that appear to be attempts to overcome rejection, as insistent requests for confirmation from the other, which obviously only amplify the feeling of rejection. All this, which appears as an inadequate and dysfunctional behavior, on the contrary, has a precise meaning and serves to define the situation (to put a boundary or a limit), that is, serves to its definitive overcoming, to its archiving.
 
It should be emphasized that those who after a first refusal insist on asking for further confirmation are judged by this to be inadequate, but are actually looking for a fracture mechanism that creates the conditions for going further. In this sense, unclear, implicit, said and denied refusals, do nothing but avoid this moment of fracture, preventing in fact the definition of the situation that remains perpetually unresolved.
 
Beyond the subjective perception, the real situations of discomfort are realized where a state of constant uncertainty persists and time passes without the guys realizing the presence or absence of a true symmetrical dimension in an affective relationship.
 
11 Affective frustrations and other frustrations
 
I would like to add that frustrations in the emotional field are often complicated by the presence of other frustrations, this time strictly individual, connected to the failure to achieve objectives related to the research and stabilization of work or success in studies, especially when failures are perceived as deriving from a lack of individual commitment in solving a problem which would really be solvable.
 
In general, frustrations due to substantial disengagement at the individual level are masked by frustrations in emotional or couple relationships that are magnified to make them appear as the core of the state of discomfort, in this case failures in emotional life are motivated by a primary, original inability, that is impossible to overcome and that is almost incumbent as an ineluctable destiny, it is the moment of "I am so, there something wrong in me, I cannot do anything!"
 
The individual frustrations, not referred to their causes but seen as an expression of something uncontrollable, trigger ideas with vaguely depressive contents that risk pervading life on various levels and setting in motion vicious circles from which it is difficult to get out.
 
Experience teaches that problems must be faced and resolved one at a time. The most meaningful thing is to avoid giving your brain a way of always spinning on the usual contents, instead choosing short-term concrete objectives to be implemented by focusing seriously on them. The antidote to frustration and the way to break a series of frustrations that risk triggering a depressive mechanism is to achieve the first successes, to lay the foundations for looking at the concrete and the goals that are really achievable shortly with an effort of individual commitment, how to take an exam, send a resume to find a job, without letting time flow when there are problems to be tackled immediately.
 
In this perspective, being gay can also lead to emotional frustrations that are difficult to accept, but rather than insist in the search for what is wrong in oneself, it makes sense to focus on individual and concrete goals, the achievement of which can lead to a clear increase in self-esteem and therefore also in the ability to face the frustrations in the couple life with greater concreteness and serenity.
 
12 Coexisting with frustrations
 
Frustrations are an indispensable element in the life of everybody and therefore it is necessary to learn to live with it, always remembering that as we have been rejected we also, more or less consciously, rejected other people or other forms of involvement, all this has nothing pathological but is part of the normal administration of emotional life.
 
13 Aggressive frustration and passive frustration
 
Speaking via msn with several gay guys, I often find myself faced with manifestations of frustration which, although quite differentiated, certainly have very similar motivations behind them. The reactions are at various intermediate levels between those of aggressive frustration and those of total passivity. I try to give an idea of the most recurrent content:
 
AGGRESSIVE FRUSTRATION - "The world sucks", "I would break everything", "People are a shit", "To someone like that I would break his face", "They are deficient and immature", "I hate them all", "I cannot stand them", "I feel like I'm throwing away my time", "Another day ended and I haven't realized anything! I cannot stand anymore throwing away my time!"
 
PASSIVE FRUSTRATION - "The others can have fun not me ", "What am I living for?", "So it's useless!", "I'll never be happy", "I don’t care about studying, so I will never succeed, my life is just a set of failures".
 
At the base of these forms of frustration there may be differently articulated motivations but all attributable to the real or presumed impossibility of living a satisfactory affective life and the belief that "others" (hetero but also gay), instead, can fully experience their emotional life.
 
14 Different types of gay frustrations
 
The frustrations are found in different forms in different groups of people:
 
- Older boys, over 35 years old, who start feeling like they have "lost the train" because they arrived too late at the acceptance of themselves or at the idea that an emotional realization is possible even for a gay guy.
 
- Boys with specific sexual orientation towards people much older than themselves who realize the difficulty of achieving what they would like and become aware of the social condemnation (even among gays) of their preferences. These guys feel marginalized even among gays.
 
- Boys with specific minority sexual orientation, that is, boys who fall in love very rarely and with guys with whom it is difficult to build a relationship. These guys don’t usually fall in love with guys with whom fall in love the majority of gay guys and have the impression that the future, for them, can consist exclusively or in the acceptance of compromise solutions or in emotional loneliness.
 
- Guys who consider themselves unsuitable to constitute a center of emotional and sexual interest for another guy both for physical and psychological reasons.
 
15 Frustration before and after the arrival of the Internet
 
I must add a reflection that often came to my mind, while talking with guys and comparing their reactions with those that my peers had when they were twenty. Forty years ago, in objective terms, the reasons for the frustration of a gay guy could be even more serious because the isolation was total and yet, for what I could see, talking to people of my generation, the sense of frustration was less deep and the tendency to seek substitute satisfactions in the study, in the career and in a social dimension, independent of the sexual orientation, was much stronger. In essence there was at the time the clear awareness of the impossibility of building a life according to one’s own principles. Today, especially thanks to the internet, the possibilities of contact between gay guys have increased enormously, but expectations have increased proportionally, and the sense of frustration, far from being sublimated in productive activities, is very strong.
 
One of the risks associated with a reality such as Project Gay consists precisely in creating a sounding board that amplifies the sense of frustration and radicalizes it. Not only that, but the direct contact with other gay guys, which at the beginning looks extremely promising, then slowly dismantles the assumption that two gay guys necessarily have a common world and brings out the differences that are often very large. The discussion between gays is not easy because it highlights that even among gays there are mechanisms of marginalization and competitiveness. All this risks radicalizing frustration: "I feel marginalized even among other gays!"
 
16 The risks of frustration
 
But let’s come to the specific risks of the sense of frustration, first of all to the depressive forms that sometimes accompany adolescence and youth of gay boys, depressive forms complicated by the fact that talking with parents is practically impossible and boys are forced to an endless acting.
 
Depression can come to manifest itself in crying, in the sense of abandonment and uselessness. It sometimes happens that some ideas related to depression become persistently recurrent and even dominant. It is the case of the guys who construct a rational discourse in support of their depressive idea, giving it an appearance of objectivity. This is the typical case of the so-called extrapolations, which are very frequent: "If I have not fallen in love in twenty years it will never happen to me!", "Everything I have done has always gone wrong and it will always be like that!" In these discourses we start from premises that can also be objective but we reach improper conclusions characterized by "always" or "never", that is, by radically negative conclusions.
 
I learned from experience that talking with guys who live depressive phases is not easy and that the first thing that needs to be kept in mind is that it is not enough to have a positive chatter to get out of the depressed mood. If on the one hand the depression should not be fed, for the other must be respected and not trivialized. Seen from the outside it looks like something almost trivial, surmountable with a little encouragement, but seen from the inside it causes deep suffering.
 
Respect towards a depressed guy must be shown by putting aside all aggressiveness towards him and every preaching attitude, all this is not easy because, for those who are not depressed, it is very difficult to realize the mechanisms of depression. The insistence is experienced by a depressed guy as a form of aggression. What instead really has a value is a presence that does not fade, which is constant but not harassing. But the subject is very complex and should be investigated.
 
The second typical risk of the frustration consists in trying to "solve the problem" through the ways that seem the easiest or perhaps the only ones that can be followed, namely the erotic chats and the meeting sites. Gay Project's online interviews show that the percentage of guys who attend erotic chats and dating sites more or less habitually is not negligible. However, it is quite probable that a good percentage of those guys don’t really enter chats or dating sites to find easy sex, in many cases those guys are driven by the sense of frustration to look inside those sites for what they cannot find elsewhere, i.e. a true emotional life. From what I see on a daily basis, many youngsters come out profoundly disappointed by the experience of dating sites and erotic chats and this only adds to the sense of frustration.
 
Apart from the risk of HIV, the alternative between visiting dating sites and sadden in a depressive state may appear to be the only one possible, even if it really it is not. What often creates conditioning is the rush to reach the solution. Among other things, the escape from the depressive loneliness can be so radically conditioning to take the boys to make them underestimate the real risks of the chats and dating sites in terms of sexually transmitted diseases and to let them consider sexual intercourses as indicative of a sure affective substrate also where it is unrealistic to expect anything like this.
 
There are guys who try to start couple relationships with guys met in chat or on the dating sites, completely expending themselves in this attempt and bringing back at the end, after many adventures, deep frustrations. The idea that the realization of sexual contacts on the basis of physical pleasure alone doesn’t realize affective well-being is difficult to accept, especially on the part of a guy fleeing from depression.
 
It would be essential to create true emotional relationships, of simple friendship, which could, if it is true friendship, allow an affective life less centered on the need for a couple's life. The idea that the life of a person identifies with his life as a couple partner and only with it, in addition to being completely unrealistic, only amplifies the expectations, before, and the sense of frustration, after, since affective life can be built only in two and not as an answer to the demanding of only one, however profound it could be.
 
Frustration also involves a further type of risk and it is the risk connected to neglecting or abandoning all other activities that contribute to building the ordinary relationship life of a gay guy, I speak of study, work, the relationship with the family of origin and with the old friends.
 
When the idea of realizing a couple life becomes dominant, everything else gradually loses weight and becomes an object of contempt or explicit disinterest.
 
Neglecting the studies because there are "more important problems" to be solved not only doesn’t solve those problems but adds others and distances the economic autonomy over time which may instead be one of the most useful elements to reduce the sense of frustration that accompanies youth of so many gay guys.
 
Unfortunately, the idea that the life of an individual is not played on the only element "life of a couple" is difficult to accept for a guy who is accustomed and pushed to consider couple life as totalizing.
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